The December 2008 Challenge
Draw up some New Year’s resolutions. Tell us what they are, and why you’ve chosen them. Go into as much detail as you’d like to. For a change of pace, we’re not requiring a specific format for your submission: you can use prose or poetry as best fits your needs.
The Results
Brian Raiter
For the year 2009
I do formally resolve
That I shall improve my writing:
Be more moving, more exciting,
More delighting and inviting.
Like a seed becomes a cedar,
So my writings shall evolve,
And refine until they shine,
Then incline to the divine:
More igniting, more inciting,
More defined with more design.
Like the weed before the weeder,
Dross and trash I shall remove,
Better blooms to supersede:
Till they thrill, arouse, entwine,
Leave the reader all involved,
With no word to disapprove.
Satisfaction guaranteed.
Now let’s drink, carouse, and dine,
And greet the year 2009.
Eric Maland
Resolutions:
Get in shape again
Go somewhere warm
Move ackack.com mail to gmail
Do more Commuter Challenges (I almost-but-not-quite did a couple this year, only finished 2 or 3 I think)
Launch at least one “product” per quarter
Get Brian involved in an iPhone project
I had an idea for a prose entry, but it never went anywhere, so I fell back on a rhyming entry. Usually when I write poetry for the Commuter Challenge I stick to a very strict form. This time I decided to not worry about the overall form, and see what developed. I still wound up holding to a four-beat meter, though, despite making a conscious effort to try and break out of that.
It might be interesting to try and take the above entry and try and rewrite it to be (say) a sonnet. How much of the existing structure could be preserved in the process? Maybe this could be seen as the first draft of a real poem….
by Brian — 6 January 2009 @ 21:43